The Secret Glossary of Social Games Analytics

If you’ve been reading up on social gaming, you’re probably familiar with terms like “microtransaction,” “core gamer,” “casual gamer” and “viral.” Maybe even “Freemium.” But buried in all the talk of Farms and Fish is a new lexicon that combines old school statistics with the latest in search engine analytics.

So, for those of you who are neither stat geeks nor analytics jockeys, here’s a crash course in basic terminology for social games metrics.

Churn
The turnover rate (or “attrition rate“) of a social game’s active players. The noise level in casual gaming is extremely high, which means social games have a user base that is constantly changing as gamers abandon the game or delete the Facebook app. Churn refers to this constant loss and gain of members.

Entry Event
An entry event is the first action a user performs when they enter the game. Online social games can track every action you perform, and the Entry Event Distribution is one of the more important metrics to follow. What do your users do first? Which entry events are the most effective at bringing people back?

For example, you might find that a majority of your users log in when they receive a gift, and the first thing they do is check that gift. By determining the more popular entry events, you can push more resources towards them, thus increasing retention, engagement and re-engagement.

Exit Event
The opposite of entry events. Exit events are the last actions a user performs before exiting the game. Tracking the Exit Event Distribution helps show why users are disengaging with the game.

K Factor
K Factor measures the virality of your product. K Factor = (Infection Rate) * (Conversion Rate). An Infection Rate is how much a given user exposes the game to other players, such as through status updates or email invites. A conversion rate, as marketers know, is when that “infection” results in a new sign up (or “install”.)

Put more simply, a K Factor of 1 means every member is bringing you one additional member. A high K Factor is treasured by social game publishers, because it becomes a very effective vehicle for bringing in new players.

Lifetime Network Value
The value a user provides to your network over the course of their entire “lifetime” on the network. For instance, is the user contributing to viral effects? Evangelizing the game? Contributing positively to ARPU? This is compared to the User Acquisition Cost, or how much it costs (via marketing and viral efforts) to bring in new members.

MAU
Like DAU, Monthly Active Users (MAU) tracks the total number of users in a given month.

Re-Engagement
Gamers stop playing eventually. Re-engagement is how you get them back. It includes re-engaging gamers who have been signed off for an hour, a day, a month, or more. There’s a lot of competition out there, so implementing and tracking re-engagement practices is a must.

Retention
Think of it as the opposite of churn. Retention is how well you maintain your userbase.

Viral Rate/Virality
Viral growth is the name of the social media game. Measured by K Factor, the Viral Rate/Virality shows how much your users are promoting, evangelizing and spreading your game. Because of this, social games are increasingly built around cooperation, competition and the constant addition of new features, which increase virality. Every feature is a source for growth, whether it’s “liking,” Facebook notifications or tweets. Not often confused with “virility.”

It doesn’t matter how much revenue per user u get unless you aren’t sure on how much yo’r going to pay to get him/her.

Atom

There is something strange in the example explaining DAU/MAU: half million users in a day but, just a million during the whole month?

GaRaA

I think that it’s not strange. You can have half million users in a day and 1 million UNIQUE in the whole month. It makes all the difference

http://www.wavedash.net/ Matt

You’re correct, that would be a little strange if you’re getting a 50% DAU/MAU ratio, and you’re not trying to pump new users into the game, you’re crazy. For the most part, a game getting 20% DAU/MAU is doing very well, with most games between 5 (uh oh) and 15.

Interestingly, the Scrabble facebook game has numbers like the (admittedly English-majorfied) example above. Here are Scrabble’s numbers from Appdata:

Great Post!! But i would like to know the standard figure for each terms used above at which you can call a game as successful. For eg: i have read somewhere that DAU/MAU if you gets between 15- 20 %, you can say that your game is successful, likely i would like to know the rest.
Pls help
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Aren

What is k in the
Lifetime Network Value formula?

Gunawr

I think it is the discount rate.

http://www.friv.uk.com/ Friv

Nowadays social gaming trend is coming in the world which is so much popular and famous among so many people who really want to play online. Above description is helpful for people who want to develop gaming application.